Some wireless communication systems apply physical-layer (PHY) mechanisms for securing transmissions from illegitimate eavesdropping. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,672,400, whose disclosure is incorporated herein by reference, describes a method for secure communication in a wireless network using a spatial division multiple access transmission scheme. The method includes allocating transmission power to N channels to be transmitted to one or more destination stations by N antennas, such that the power to be received by each one of the one or more destination stations is not greater by more than a predefined power margin than a minimum power required for reception at a desired quality of service.
As another example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,751,353, whose disclosure is incorporated herein by reference, describes a method for securing a wireless transmission. The method includes transmitting a noise transmission to be received by one or more destinations other than an intended destination of a packet during a time period corresponding to the duration of the packet.
Additional examples of secure transmission schemes are described by Goel and Negi, in “Guaranteeing Secrecy using Artificial Noise,” IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, volume 7, no. 6, June, 2008, pages 2180-2189; and by Swindlehurst, in “Fixed SINR Solutions for the MIMO Wiretap Channel,” Proceedings of the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Taipei, Taiwan, April, 2009, pages 2437-2440, which are incorporated herein by reference.